ScottVee Gaming

I like to find a style of game app and then look at similar games to see the range of possibilities.  Since Halloween is totally dead this year, I thought I should look through my phone and tablet for apps I have not mentioned on the blog yet. I gathered up some dice matching app games back in late 2023 to early 2024.  In these, you get one or two dice per round and can place them on the grid (rotating the two dice first if needed).  Typically, three 1s becomes a two and so on up to the three 7s which disappear and free up some room.  If you run out of space, game over. Those are all very simple, but they are good for short breaks at work.  Some I found are: Seven Dots, by Funvent Studios Dice Craft And this one simply called Merge.  In the App Store it's "Dice Merge" by Staple Games.  It last updated 30 Aug 2024.  I saw no difference from the previous version.  It's very basic, time to drop it. Most of these look like hobby projects, not sli...

Following up on the last post about old "roguelike" games, I looked at a few of the entries to the 7-Day Roguelike Dungeon Challenge, and here's one that went in a completely unexpected direction ... HyperRogue has your PC running around on a hyperbolic world.  You're essentially in the middle of what looks like a hex grid, but on a hyperbolic space, the paths double again and again as they near the edge, so as you walk in any direction, more hexes unfold in ways that hurt the brain.  I can't imagine trying to find my way back to a previous location.  It's not technically hexagons, either, the space expands by including heptagons in just the right places, and each of those brings in a new branch of tiles. There is an extensive Tour/Tutorial where you hint Enter to get to the next slide, and it turns out there's a massive world here divided into about 40 regions, each with unique tiles and mobs.  There is an explanation of hyperbolic geometry, and how the n...

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs...

I was tinkering around in a game called Moonshades, which I would classify as a "semi-3D" dungeon crawler.  The scenes have 3-d elements, but they are fairly static.  You can walk (forward, backward, left or right, or turn left, turn right) to step one chunk at a time through a maze.  Fight monsters, take their stuff, level up your characters.  I find these relaxing, and really enjoy the highly creative names for the hundreds of items.  These modern games have some amusing cheats, like having teleport pads in every main encounter area so you don't have to walk all the way home through every level just to get to your drop chest.  I have also heard "two-and-a-half d" for these. While this is a fine game, with plenty to fight, and lots of abilities and spells to learn, and even some crafting, it got an old memory stuck in my head. So last night I was trying to remember one specific game from the 90s, a really early game of this type.  It was a DOS game wi...

We have seen this game a few times, and it looked cute.  We finally got a copy a few weeks back, finally got a chance to try it out today and, well ... it was confusing and weird, and not in the good way where we feel we're going to discover something we like.  We really wanted to like it, so we pushed through whatever the rulebook was trying to say. The rules really need a better section on how to identify the different types of cards, it just starts by saying to sort that big stack of cards you've never seen before into a deck for each dragon character card, a deck for each season, and a market deck. It turns out that the seasonal cards have colors behind the top half, and the market deck starts packed with the cards with a little "st" in the lower right (the "starter cards"), and the dragon cards all match the names at bottom center.  But a few cards have no markings, and we just threw them in the market deck.   Yes, there is a detailed Card Glossary page...

This is another game we got from Geppettos.  10 Days in the USA has a big game board map of the USA, a deck of cards and some plastic holders for organizing player hands and discard piles.  The goal is simple: to build a 10-card trip across the country. Most of the cards are states, including Alaska & Hawaii.  Other cards include cars that let you skip a state, and planes that let you jump to any state of the same color.  Note that the color of the plane must match the card before and after it, so you can't use a red card to hop between green states.  Side note: any color plane can get to Hawaii or Alaska. We do like rules-light games and that's about all the rules to be found here, except for one rule about how the travel in the four corners area.  You draw a card each turn, replace one of the cards in your rack, and discard one.  Once a card is in your rack you cannot move it. Actual gameplay was moderately frustrating for Anne, and like usual wi...

The last new app of the week was Lords of Discord.  Again, this was turn-based, but this time the style was orthogonal and the combatants stand in specific spots and do their thing.  The initiative is show by sorting the icons at the top of the screen and as each guy's turn comes up, you can attack, defend, or wait.  Some guys have special abilities.  The usual stuff. There was a castle screen, of course, but after the first visit, it was almost always covered up by a big frame trying to get me to go to the arena or whatever.  I was able to train two new troops, but I only had one slot open in my party.  There is a reasonable range of character types and art to choose from, but it just feels like something is missing.  I should be able to take more PCs out to explore, but I guess everything is perfectly balanced to the expected party strength.  I don't know. It would add a lot if you could move a PC to a different space during battle.  The fi...